One interesting American thing (a technical term, meaning a moment or event, a text, a controversy, an idea, a figure, or whatevertheheckelse I think of) per day, from Ben Railton, a professor of American literature, culture, history, and, natch, Studies.

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Monday, August 18, 2014

August 18, 2014: Films for the Dog Days: Dog Day Afternoon

[Nothing beats
the summer heat better than watching characters sweat it out from the coolness
of a movie theater. So in this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy five hot and
heavy dog days films. Add your responses and summertime movies for a
crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll sweat it out!]

On the gritty
crime drama that’s sneakily subversive.

Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon(1975), which was based on a
Life magazine story about an
actual August 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery, is first and foremost a gritty,
realistic story of that
crime and its messy aftermath. The opening montage of sweaty summertime
New York sets that scene pitch-perfectly, and the rest of the film, despite
starring Hollywood heavyweight Al Pacino at the height of his Godfather-driven fame, follows suit. Much of
what drives the film’s plot, for example, are small realistic details that
produce big problems and changes—a young criminal’s second thoughts, a security
guard’s asthma attack, the bank manager’s collapse in diabetic shock. And
virtually all of the film’s scenes take place in and around the bank’s cramped,
tense, sweaty confines, greatly amplifying that sense of intimate scope and scale.

Yet despite that
tight focus, Dog Day Afternoon works in
a couple of complex and interestingly subversive social themes and
commentaries. For one thing, there’s the scene where Pacino’s Sonny
Wortzik briefly exits the bank to talk with Charles Durning’s police detective;
the conversation escalates, and Sonny concludes by shouting “Attica! Attica!”
while the gathered crowd cheers him on. The moment is an allusion to the 1971 Attica prison rebellion,
a five-day standoff between inmates who took over the jail and federal troops
that ended
in a bloodbath, with thirty-three inmates and ten hostages (all corrections
officers) dead. While the rebellion might seem an isolated incident, and one
specific to the prison world in which it occurred, the film’s evocation of it
reflects a different reality: that in this post-1960s era of cynicism and
distrust, the period that produced Kent State and Watergate,
many Americans saw the rebelling prisoners as potential counter-culture heroes.
Sonny isn’t much of a hero, but in this moment, he certainly gives voice to
such a perspective as well.

Sonny also
connects to the film’s other and even more subversive element, through the
character of his second wife Leon Shermer, a pre-operative transsexual played
brilliantly by Chris Sarandon. Leon’s gender identity is in fact one of the
film’s driving elements, as we learn that it is to pay
for Leon’s sex reassignment surgey that Sonny tried to rob the bank (his
first such crime). When I call Leon’s character subversive, I don’t just mean
the presence of a transsexual character in a mainstream 1970s Hollywood film,
striking as that presence is—I also and especially mean the way in which the
other major characters, from Pacino to Durning’s police officer, engage with
Leon as a person and an equal, not as an “other” or a freak or any of the other
demeaning possibilities we might expect. Sarandon’s wonderful performance
certainly contributes to that humanizing, leading to a character whose identity
is radical and revolutionary without feeling the slightest bit overt about
those effects. Definitely makes for a film worth checking out on a dog day
afternoon (or any other time).

1 comment:

I am certain that somewhere in here you will mention the traditional summer fare I want to try to beat you to the punch. Summer movies can be very controversial, like DDA as you mention, but typically summer fare is lighter, funnier and stupid...er. So here's my favs from the 80s!

Weekend At Bernies - Andrew McCarthy before he went all crazy-eyes!

Space Camp - I have a love/hate relationship with this film. Most of the country just hates it.

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